The Last King of Scotland (1998) Read online

  Account? I’ll give them account. They all took pretty much the same line, and were written in a similar nudge-nudge fashion. I was, however, surprised by the part about Swanepoel helping the Israelis. It explained a lot. I wondered why the reporters hadn’t asked me about it, and then I realized they must have got the information from correspondents in Kampala or Nairobi after they had spoken to me. Cursing the breed, and cursing myself, I turned off the light and fell asleep, lulled by the motion of the train.

  I woke early and, as the morning light softened, watched the northern tip of Loch Lomond run alongside the track. I realized then, as we passed into the rusty wastes of Rannoch Moor – the ridges of grass and heather broken by impressive slabs of rock – how cluttered by trees and shrubs the Ugandan landscape had been, how oppressive its ripe, relentless swaths of green.

  Once we had pulled into Fort William, I called Moira again from a payphone, knowing that she would be worried. I saw the papers. You didn’t do any of those things? she asked me nervously. I did nothing I am ashamed of. What they are saying in Kampala is rubbish. It’s typical of what happens when revenge is in the air. She pleaded with me to come and see her again, and confirmed she’d sent the journal and tapes. I told her, Right now I need peace and quiet, and Eamonn’s oldplace can give me that.

  After I had spoken to her, I hired a car with the money I’d drawn out, and did a bit of shopping: clothes, mainly, as I hadn’t anything at all beyond what was on me, plus two bottles of whisky and a boxful of basic foodstuffs. Then I began the long drive by loch and glen to the west. The roads were empty – but winding, and quite foggy, too, so I had to take care. In some places, the fog came wraith-like up the windscreen as I drove. I’d forgotten how eerie it was.

  I was only fifteen miles from Mallaig when the car broke down. The power failed and I chugged to a halt on the verge. I’d gone through a puddle not long before. I supposed the water must have sprung up and got on to something. When the engine coughed itself into silence, it was like one had been turned off in my own head: all the bad Amin feelings came flooding back.

  I stood by the side of the road, feeling sorry for myself. The fog had lifted and although it was still relatively cold, bright shafts of sunshine were coming down. I looked out over the moorland. Suddenly, in a bush right next to me, the ears of a hare popped up. The winter sunlight shone through them, turning tissue and cartilage to pink cellophane. I took a step closer – and in an instant it had leapt up and was shooting across the moor, jouking from side to side.

  I watched it until it went out of sight and then I came back to the car. I opened the bonnet and poked about among the plugs. Then I got back in and tried the ignition. It nearly caught. I took a sheet from the sports pages of one of the accursed newspapers, wiped the sparking cables with it, and tried the key again. This time, thank God, it started. I got back in again, and soon the houses and shoreline of Mallaig swung into sight around a bend.

  After a short wait I drove on to the ferry, bumping over the steel panels where it joined to the dock. Getting out, I breathed the sea air in deeply and found myself a pleasant situation in the bows, where I could watch the wake stream back to the mainland. The crossing took a while, gannets and gulls going past at eye level on the balcony. There were fishing boats and yachts in the bay: one came so close I could hear its sail rattling as it bellied out with wind.

  I went up to the stern. The jagged, antlered peaks of the Cuillins were in view (the King’s Chimney and the Inaccessible Pinnacle I would later climb), and soon the steel panels went down again. I got back in the car, queued, and rolled off. Then, with the smell of peat and heather coming in through the window, I drove up through Skye: Knock Bay, Isleornsay, Broadford, Dunan – and round to Sconser.

  I’d arranged with the hire company to leave the car at its depot there. This I did, and then got on to a smaller boat for the last part of my journey: NG on his own with the boxful of food and the clothes in plastic bags. It was a less magnificent approach – the island smaller, the rock slabs and ridges less imposing – but I cannot describe the feeling of utter joy I experienced when Mael-rubha’s mountain came into sight through the mist, getting bigger every second, the vague outline of its ruins – the tall stone cross, the circle itself, the tops of the pine trees around it spearing the clouds behind them.

  Once we docked, I noticed that there was a Morrison’s right there on the quay, its sign oddly modern amongst the masts and heaps of nets and ropes. I need not have bought the food at all. A hotel, too, the Ossian, and an ironmonger’s and ship’s chandlers.

  There are only about a hundred dwellings on the island, so the bothy wasn’t difficult to find. A fisherman in yellow oilskins, who said he had known Eamonn quite well, gave me the simple directions. I followed the stony track through the pine trees as he told me. It was covered with sheep droppings: green-brown musket balls.

  The trees eventually parted into a half-moon clearing full of hummocky grass, in the middle of which was a stone cottage with two chimneys and a slate roof. A lone rowan tree, its branches twisted by gales, stood outside the door.

  There was a thick manila package on the step in the porch. I picked it up and recognized Moira’s handwriting. It must be the journal, I thought. I hadn’t expected it to be here by the time I arrived.

  I opened the door. Inside, the place appeared almost exactly as Uncle Eamonn must have left it – a plate on the kitchen table, the kettle on the stove, doors open like someone had just passed through them, the bed unmade in the low-beamed bedroom – and six months’ worth of dust over the lot of it.

  I looked round. It isn’t a bothy proper, I thought, it’s got more than one room. He’d had it extended, and the power and phone put in: I was surprised that they hadn’t cut them off, but I supposed things happened slowly up here. (They do.) It was still small, though, and it smelt stale – but it was a bolt-hole par excellence. As I explored it, I had the oddest sensation. I will be here for the rest of my life, I thought – and so far, that much is true.

  My explorations of the place concluded, I fiddled with the blue Calor gas cylinder, finally managing to get the stove to light. I fried up some small, bitter sausages out of my cardboard box and ate them with bread and tomato sauce.

  I then made a fire with some logs that were stacked inside the porch. Once it had got going, I settled into an armchair with Moira’s package on my lap and one of the bottles of whisky at my side. Having poured myself some into a chipped china cup, I sat there in a daze for half an hour or so. The lamp in the rough-plastered ceiling flickered as the wind blew outside.

  After a few sips of whisky, I found myself- in that dim light and half-conscious state – reading the label on the back of the bottle: Eight years ago we began to make plans for today, laying down stocks of the finest malt and grain whiskies, to bring you a blend of unparalleled quality. The result? Bell’s Extra Special is now even more special. In Bell’s eight-year-old you’ll find more character, more to excite, more to stimulate, more to discover.

  And then I tore open the package, and began to read what was inside. It was strange to see that old journal again, its bent black cover with the mouldy red spine, my crabbed handwriting between the lines; and as I turned the pages, I remembered some of the times on the veranda in Mbarara or in the State House gardens when I had written things – and I remembered also Amin’s thick fingers leafing through it at his escritoire, and then his face looking up at me.

  43

  Water laps the bow. The shore is at my back and the wide sea in front. There are gulls diving round my ears, and my hand is on the tiller of my life. Not really, but I am out in Malachi’s boat again and the waves are choppier than usual, even for early morning. It is good to get some fresh air into my lungs after another night at my desk – the final one, I hope.

  The gulls call. I keep my eye on the orange buoy I’ve taken as my marker.

  It has been a struggle to remember everything, to put it all down just as it happ
ened – to face myself squarely while avoiding the dubious benefit of hindsight. It is all over now, the loathsome mask has fallen, but I still find myself haunted by the image of Amin. Whenever I turn on the radio or television, he seems to be mentioned. The Ugandan government (such as it is – the fighting continues there, between different factions) has made an official complaint to the Saudi Arabians about their harbouring of him, saying that he should be returned for trial.

  Whenever I try to think about him now, a kind of mental speechlessness descends on me. He himself was so supple verbally, in some ways, and that is what I remember most about him: his gangster sophistry, his miraculous tongue. He had all the best tunes, yes, and we let him have them. Yet at the same time, he only half-knew his spells. He got them wrong. As for my conscience, there is something about it all – at the point where I, Idi Amin and the world came together – that I cannot fix. It all changes whenever I look at it. Mutability. Maybe realizing that is the answer.

  I have been out long enough. It is at least an hour since I pulled off from the land into the cold grey brightness that is the Inner Sound. My face is starting to get chapped from the wind, and I’m ready to turn now. Ready to turn and happy in the knowledge that this world of Amin’s, with all its blood and crazed illusions, is slipping away. Already it is all behind me. For the first time in a while I am happy, happy in the knowledge that, whatever happens, I can be myself now.

  I push the rubber handle of the motor, feel the weight of the water against it, and then the world spins on its axis and I’m facing the island again. I can see the tall cross and ruins of Mael-rubha, up on the mountain, and below that the slates and the two little gable-end chimneys on the roof of the bothy. If I draw a triangle with the bothy as the base, the cross as the apex, in the very middle of it would be the smudge of blackened earth where the bonfire for the festival was. The Burning of the Clavie.

  This is how it is. An Archangel tar-barrel is sawn in two. The bottom half is fixed to a salmon-fisher’s stake, by means of a specially forged nail, which has to be hammered in with a stone, not a hammer. All the equipment has to be borrowed, or given. None of it can be bought. Staves of a herring-cask are attached to the barrel and the whole thing, filled with wood soaked in tar, is set alight and carried round the island by the Clavie King, followed by his retinue. It’s bad luck if he falls or stumbles, for him and for the whole island. Later it is mounted up on the stone cross and the king and his men break it up. Everyone gathers up the broken glowing pieces and keeps them in the house for good luck.

  Until the next year. This time – I saw it all – there was a fight between the hippies and the king’s men, who didn’t like them following. When I asked Malachi what the Clavie was, he said, It’s the deil, can ye not see that? I wuld ‘a thought ye could see that, doctor.

  The motor throbs as land comes closer. I have a sensation of losing track of time. In front of me, the mountain floats up with the swell. Drifts away amid tendrils of mist. And then comes back into sight. Its gorse-pocked granite flanks – the surface rolling slightly where there are colonies of fulmar and puffin in the corrie – represent a scene of as wild a nature as I’ve ever seen. For though I have heard the weird moanings of Afro-montane forest giants, and the terrible yelps of leopard and hyena, this island of sheep and rocks fills me with awe. Maybe I will get used to it; maybe it is simply that one alien vision determines another.

  One of Malachi’s crab-pots rolls around in the bottom of the boat. There are scales everywhere, from the fish he uses to bait the pots. They look like children’s finger-nails.

  I know what I have become. I know what I have seen. I know about all those people who died – and yet also I do not know about them. And I know, also, that most of my life is now behind me, just as Amin’s is. I wonder how long he will live, what shape that life will take. I myself could not settle back down into an ordinary existence. I saw all those people at the bus stops in London waiting to go to work. I’d rather take my chance in Uganda again than have to go to work every day by bus.

  Yes, most of my life is behind me now, my powers – such as they were – dissipated, diluted, like the throb of this motor as it goes into the water, its sonar circles rolling out far from sky’s light and land’s edge, grazing the top of silver mackerel, greasy green fronds of seaweed and the lace-like skirts of anemone. The engine putters, fades, goes on…as, beyond it, both small fry and the bulky shapes of the deeper ocean lock their ears on its earlier motions, flail blindly away from or towards their threat, their promise.

  I feel the cold salt wind at the back of my head. A buffet. A gust. The mock-Gothic battlements of the hotel are in front of me. I’m alongside the pier, tide-wrack floating all around me.

  I wrap the rope round one of the cast-iron mushrooms outside the Ossian and walk up through the pine trees to the bothy, past sloping rocks covered with lichen and a cluster of ruined cottages in a clearing, with cocoa-brown sheep grazing among the masonry. I suddenly think of the Bacwezi, their sacred grove of figs.

  The honeysuckle round the door to my own dwelling, I’m irritated to see, has fallen away. I’ll have to nail it back up. On the stone step, I see that the newspaper has arrived. I pick it up and go inside. I drop it on the kitchen table and put on the kettle to make myself a mug of coffee.

  While it’s boiling, I settle down to read. The headline on page three is: fringe terror, with a tartan tinge. Below, this:

  LATE last night, Special Branch officers said that they believed they had tracked down the source of the series of letter bombs and radio-controlled devices that have been exploding throughout Scotland during the past two years.

  Already being dubbed the most successful bomber in Scottish history, the nationalist extremist Major Archibald Drum-mond Weir was arrested at his home in Broughton two days ago, charged with terrorist activities. He is allegedly the perpetrator of a number of threatened or actual explosions, including a bomb detonated at the entrance to the Clyde Tunnel in June, and the letter bomb sent to Downing Street last week, which exploded just 75 feet from the Prime Minister. Other similar charges are being prepared in connection with bombs placed at or sent to targets as diverse as the House of Commons, offices of nationalized industries (British Steel headquarters) and Glasgow City Chambers.

  Major Weir, a former British Army intelligence officer and an expert in radio technology, admits that he is leader of the Army of the Provisional Government, which has claimed responsibility for the majority of the explosions. But he denies that he was acting as an agent provocateur for the security services, as has been suggested.

  “My client does not recognize the rule of Whitehall,” the Major’s solicitor told reporters outside Broughton police station yesterday. “He has asked me to read out the following statement: “Since I was a young man, my cherished aim has been to restore the Stuarts. I believe in a fully independent Scotland with its own history, culture and industry – a country with its own natural genius, a country able to make choices according to its own spirit. Scotland did not choose the closure of coal mines, Scotland did not choose the closure of shipyards, Scotland did not choose nuclear power stations and the leukaemia that they bring. That is why I have done what I have done.””

  Sources reveal that Weir has been active in nationalist circles since he was recalled from Idi Amin’s Uganda, where he had been Military Attache at the British Embassy in Kampala. A Special Branch insider said it was the Amin connection that had led them to Weir, who, while in Africa, had secretly secured the dictator’s support for the nationalist cause.

  “We knew that Amin had been in touch with nationalist groups before he was deposed. We became aware that some of the earlier devices were constructed from equipment originally earmarked for the Ugandan Army by the Ministry of Defence, in the period before Amin’s reign of terror became well known. It was then a matter of tracking back to those the dictator had been involved with.”

  The kettle starts to whistle, but I don’t get up
.

  Other nationalist elements, meanwhile, maintain that the Major is indeed an MI5 counter-insurgent posing as a clandestine extremist in order to flush out potential terrorists, and that his arrest is a bluff.

  A statement put out by the Scottish National Liberation Army cites the notebooks of the poet and activist Hugh Mac-Diarmid, who died in 1978: “MacDiarmid was President of the 1320 Club. Their members, of which Weir was originally one, believed that the British imperial state would not yield power to Scotland without violence. The club was named after the year of the Declaration of Arbroath. MacDiarmid soon identified Weir as a police spy and denounced him. Then Weir disappeared. Now we know that he went to Uganda to engage in other British-sponsored activities against notionally independent states.”

  The Scottish Nationalist Party, which proscribes membership of both the APG and the 1320 Club, said that it did not condone violence of any sort. “Scotland urgently needs self-determination but violence is not the route to be taken. Bombs are not the answer.”

  To the right of the story, there is a picture of Weir being escorted to a police van from a rather squalid-looking cottage. He’s wearing a tartan-trimmed beret and Arran stockings. The whistling has become insistent. I take the kettle off the stove and make the coffee in a daze, staring at the picture on the table as I do so.

  The phone rings. I jump. For some reason, I wonder vaguely whether it might be Sara. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Hello, my good friend. Is it you, Doctor Nicholas?”

  I say nothing, imagining Sara coming out of the sea like a mermaid.

  “Hello, hello?”

  Outside, I hear the deep moan of the ocean. I think of the island, my island, settling on the waves like a butterfly as that brochure had it, and of Mr Malumba’s hill, blown by a magic power through the skies of Africa, smothering all beneath it.